Blizzard dropped us a note to clear up some possible confusion about the multiplayer experience for Australians in the upcoming StarCraft 2, noting that the servers for Australians will be hosted in 'Southeast Asia':

'Blizzard Entertainment also announced today that both the standard edition and Collector's Edition of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty will give players from Australia and New Zealand access to play on servers based in Southeast Asia, alongside gamers from Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. This local datacenter will offer players in the region improved latency for a high-quality gameplay and connectivity experience.'

While having local servers would be awesome (and we know after our recent interview that it's still an option for Blizzard), there should be little problem for us playing on these servers. Hopefully cross-server play will be an option for those pro-gamers that want to hit up the international scene a little more at a later date.

Possible true but after you join the game it's only the latency to the other players that count and they could be next door. And I'd suspect the matching system will take latency into account as well as rank

Worries me a little because of the new BattleNet system.. if we're on the BattleNet shared with these countries, not the US, will our friends from WoW be able to speak to us while we're playing Starcraft, that kinda thing? Also.. I really hope they don't consider giving us our own WoW servers that we need to share with the majority of countries in that area that don't speak English.

Im not buying the game if we have to play with people from just Thailand and Indonesia. Ill wait till its not region restricted.
Out of those countries only New Zealand speaks English.
At least most koreans can do English.

Singaporians speak majority English (In some cases better then most Australians in high school).PNG speaks English as well...

I get the point about languages but in a 1v1 match does it REALLY matter in an RTS weather or not your opponent speaks your tongue? At least this way if they insult you it just seems funny instead of making most people rage...

any effort by Blizzard to reduce Aussie lag gets a "top gun windmill high five" from me any day. Keep it up. I'm sure they'll get the balance right eventually. Now all they need to do is slap one in Sydney (where Exetel routes my connection) and I'll be be the fastest zergling on the creep.

I managed to get spanked by some kid from Malaysia the other nite (in a Beta practice match).....his engrish very good. I'm assuming their games will be in their native language....will be some funky chat translations going on I reckon.

Possible true but after you join the game it's only the latency to the other players that count and they could be next door. And I'd suspect the matching system will take latency into account as well as rank

yeh latency doesn't really make a big difference. The 'servers' in this context are just for matchmaking - it's not a client/server game so ping to these things is pretty much irrelevant.

This was true for battle.net 1.0 but it is not the case anymore for battle.net 2.0. All games are hosted through battle.net and no one directly connects to each other.

The problem with this whole situation is the lack of an option. It doesnt sound like we have a choice of which region we want to go to - which is totally f***ed.

Ping also isnt an issue when the battle.net default ping is set to 250, for everyone (higher for australians but again this can be fixed with proxy services).

And being region locked in general is pretty crap for people in australia who want to participate in american online comps (which if the beta is anything to go by is where most of the comps are held, that and europe).

This is already a huge and annoying situation in beta where theres an international invitational and people in europe have to borrow accounts just to play on the US servers and vice versa, just to compete. These region locks on accounts seem to be totally counter productive to blizzards mission statement of wanting to promote e-sports. oh well

In their defense, they did say it wasn't a permanent thing and they're working on getting it so everyone can play everyone. I guess if it comes down a choice of delaying the game while they fix problems that stop all the different regions being able to play each other, or release it sooner with some region locks, they're going to go for the latter.

its like playing hon with europeans, they are all swedes or ruskies or some stupid country wherre no one talks english, i only play matchmaking games set to US now, even though the ping sux the play is much better - f*** having to play with asians all day, i think you should be able to select a language and only play with ppl who use that language

Fragmented communities suck. Even if it is temporary its still very lame.

The worse thing about this S.E asia server is that it doesnt include South Korea and to a lesser extent china, the 2 powerhouses of the region in craft games. So we kind of get screwed over twice. Once for not being able to play with mostly english speaking players and the 2nd time having the whole of asia split in 2 as well. its all a crock of crap!

Dudes, they pretty much said it was only temporary. Blizzard are actually trying to do something right by you by trying to make your initial experience as smooth as possible, instead of having laggy servers..